COVER STORY: Planned Parenthood's activities finally exposed

by Bill Muehlenberg

News Weekly, March 5, 2011

Given that Planned Parenthood is one of the greatest promoters of death around the globe, it is fitting that we may be witnessing the death of this nefarious organisation. We are certainly seeing, if not its death, then its long-overdue meltdown because of widespread adverse reaction to it.

On February 18, the US House of Representatives voted to scrap funding for Planned Parenthood. House members approved the amendment by Republican congressman Mike Pence by a vote of 240-185. The debate now moves to the US Senate. It has been a horror month or two for the organisation, and this is just the icing on the cake for pro-life forces.

Planned Parenthood in the US has been caught red-handed engaging in all sorts of horrific activities of late, including trying to cover up sex-trafficking, offering abortion to minors, engaging in life-threatening botched abortions, breaking various laws, and seeking to discredit whistleblowers.

Planned Parenthood's public image wasn't helped very much when young Canadian pop sensation Justin Bieber announced recently that he was pro-life. In an interview for the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine (March 2011) he said, "I really don't believe in abortion. It's like killing a baby?"

Furthermore, a new national survey found that 53 per cent of American voters consider abortion morally wrong most of the time, while just 32 per cent say it is morally acceptable most of the time. Another 15 per cent of Americans are undecided.

No wonder Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards has called the public exposé of her organisation "the worst attack - ever". While she may call it an attack, many others would describe it as an attempt to get some truth and light into this deceptive and dark organisation, to expose the many shameful activities which regularly take place there.

Then there was the recent defection of a Planned Parenthood leader, Abby Johnson, who spilled the beans on her former employer. (See Steven W. Mosher's article, "Abortion-provider has second thoughts", News Weekly, February 19, 2011).

But the real question that needs to be asked is why wasn't the heat turned up on Planned Parenthood years ago? It has been around since 1916, and has been pushing appalling philosophies, policies and practices ever since. Many have known for decades what a horrific outfit it is, yet few have spoken out against it.

Several important books exposing Planned Parenthood were written a few decades ago. Back in 1988 George Grant wrote a very important exposé of the movement, Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood (Adroit Press). A fourth revised edition was published by Cumberland House Publishing in 1999.

This thoroughly researched and documented volume really lifted the lid on the ugly world of Planned Parenthood.

Grant begins his description of the group with these words: "Planned Parenthood is the world's oldest, largest, and best-organised provider of abortion and birth control services." No wonder it is so often referred to as "Planned Barrenhood".

He continues: "It has expanded dramatically into a multi-billion dollar international conglomerate with programs and activities in 130 nations on every continent. In the United States alone, it employs more than 20,000 staff personnel and volunteers in over 800 clinics, nearly 200 affiliates, and more than 50 chapters in every major metropolitan area, coast to coast."

Another lengthy and important critique of Planned Parenthood came in 1991 with Blessed are the Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood by Robert Marshall and Charles Donovan (Ignatius). Their volume also thoroughly documented the insidious agenda of this radical social engineering organisation.

Anyone reading these two books (each one running to 400 pages) would not only become a mini-authority on Planned Parenthood, but would see why concerned citizens have long sought to expose the diabolical workings of this group. It has been one of the most destructive and dangerous groups to operate freely for the past century.

One cannot really understand the horrific agenda of Planned Parenthood without knowing something about its founder.

Unfortunately, most people know nothing about this, and Planned Parenthood is careful not to let the public know too much about its actual beginning. But we all need to know about Planned Parenthood's founder, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966).

This is not the place to provide a detailed look at Sanger. Suffice it to say that she was a radical eugenicist, pro-abortionist, racist, socialist, atheist and coercive utopian. She proudly championed promiscuity and "free love"; sex education for the youngest of children; radical feminism; forced sterilisation for those she considered to be less than human; and segregation of inferior classes and races.

The best way to demonstrate her malevolent ideology is by letting her speak in her own words. Her own writings and speeches are mind-boggling, and they show just what a monstrous worldview she held to. This explains why Planned Parenthood has been such a force for evil in the world.

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)

Consider just a few select quotes of Margaret Sanger:

• "The most merciful thing that a large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it."

• "Birth control: to create a race of thoroughbreds."

• "Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise."

• "We who advocate Birth Control ... lay all our emphasis upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those who are born in health. The eugenist also believes that a woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. We hold that the world is already over-populated. Eugenists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her first duty to the state."

• "We prefer the policy of immediate sterilisation, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded."

• "In the early history of the race, so-called 'natural law' reigned undisturbed. Under its pitiless and unsympathetic iron rule, only the strongest, most courageous could live and become progenitors of the race. The weak died early or were killed. Today, however, civilisation has brought sympathy, pity, tenderness and other lofty and worthy sentiments, which interfere with the law of natural selection. We are now in a state where our charities, our compensation acts, our pensions, hospitals, and even our drainage and sanitary equipment all tend to keep alive the sickly and the weak, who are allowed to propagate and in turn produce a race of degenerates."

• "[Woman's] instincts are fundamentally creative, not destructive. But her sex-bondage has made her the dumb instrument of the monster she detests. For centuries she has populated the earth in ignorance and without restraint, in vast numbers and with staggering rapidity. She has become not the mother of a nobler race, but a mere breeding-machine grinding out a humanity which fills insane asylums, almshouses and sweat shops, and provides cannon fodder that tyrants may rise to power on the sacrifice of her offspring."

Just as horrendous are these quotes from other writers she allowed to be published in her Birth Control Review:

• "The propagation of the unfit must be suppressed, and the accumulation of the debris which encumbers society must be prevented. Science has relieved us of famines and epidemics; science could rid us of the multiplication of degenerate types doomed to lives of wretchedness and incapacity. By what means? Malthus no doubt could show us the way." - Henry De Variguy.

• "Godspeed the day when the unwilling mother, with her weak, puny body, her sad, anaemic unlovely face, and her dependent whine, will be no more. In that day, we shall see a race of American thoroughbreds, if not the superman." - Anna E. Blount, MD.

• "The good preacher 'thanks God that Susannah Wesley [mother of religious reformer John Wesley] was not the kind of woman' who refuses to do her full duty in the line of babies. He wishes this country 'had a million mothers like Susannah Wesley.' It has. There are probably several million just as thoughtless and improvident as she was. The country is full of foolish women who continually bring into the world babies.... I might point out to Dr Cadman that most of Susannah's babies were of no use. Only John and Charles amounted to a hill of beans. The rest were nonentities, like all the Washington brood except George." - Charles Hiram Chapman.

• "The plain and simple truth is that they [children] are born needlessly. There are still far too many births for our civilisation to look after adequately; we are still unfit to be trusted with a rising birth rate. Our civilisation at present has neither the courage to kill them outright quickly, cleanly and painlessly, nor the heart and courage and ability to give them what they need." - H.G. Wells.

Given these quotes, it is not at all surprising that Sanger was closely associated with the Nazi doctors and the eugenicists whom Hitler employed to enact his Final Solution. She fully endorsed their use of euthanasia, abortion, sterilisation and infanticide.

And it is her organisation that American taxpayers have been subsidising for decades. The sooner this miserable organisation is put out of action the better.

We should all have learned to reject eugenics from the disastrous attempt to establish the Third Reich - but we seem to be such slow learners.

Bill Muehlenberg is a commentator on contemporary issues, and lectures on ethics and philosophy. His website CultureWatch is at: www.billmuehlenberg.com